January 28

A couple of weeks ago, an article was published in Science about online science communication (nothing new there, really, that we have not known for a decade, but academia is slow to catch up). Over time I’ve grown more and more suspicious of stories about breakthrough technologies. Quite frankly, if the company’s numbers are correct, this could be the biggest solar news of the decade. Here’s an interesting solar technology I recently ran across — Solarphasec’s 3D Spin Cell Generators (or, as I call them, solar cones). For the vast majority of those looking to harvest energy from the sun to satisfy domestic or business electricity needs, the photovoltaic world is a static and flat one. Anyone knows to get the most out of a solar cell it needs to be angled at the sun. As our expanding economies continue to demand more and more energy, things are getting more expensive. A solar venture says it has developed a “spin cell” technology using specialized lensing and a rotating conical shape that could generate five times more electricity from a given amount of land than conventional solar methods. Hey, Kids!

"at my job we have the opposite problem.. .the “CEO got a new puppy” problem, in which every little transaction is considered to be newsworthy, and a lot of my job is spent explaining to leadership that..." Martha on I.76